When I was a little girl I wanted to be Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, Florence Nightingale, and a priest. I was told I couldn't be a priest - because I was a girl - but girls could be nuns {hello, not the same!}and that nursing is a good choice for a girl. Also, writing might be a nice hobby but not much of a career. Maybe you could become a teacher, after all teachers used words a lot (hello, not the same! but teaching -ing not er - sounded interesting : writing and teaching do go together). Yes, teacher or nurse would be good careers for you.
Except I wasn't asking for career counseling. It took me forty or so years to understand that saying I wanted to be Clara, Louisa, Florence; a priest or teach, wasn't about a job, I was talking about how I wanted to live.
I was a kid who voraciously read biographies. How people lived out of who they were; their passions, their personality and temperament, their circumstances of life and most of all, what they did with those combinations fascinated me. My appetite for stories of persons and their ways of living was insatiable. Especially delicious stories were stories where I glimmered some piece of myself. Which is how I came to say that I wanted to be Clara, Louisa, Florence and a priest (I loved the stories of missionaries and saints.)
What I was really saying when talking about Clara and Louisa; Florence, being a priest and teaching was how do I discover the way of living I saw in their stories? How do I become a heroine? Lives that resonated with me were stories of being heroic in life. How do I become brave enough to be heroic with my life?
I'm willing to bet the word heroic brings to mind great deeds of valor: actions that save lives like when someone rescues another from a burning building or digs through the rubble of an earthquake or shields another from harm with their body. Heroic action indicates someone who is willing to risk their body and/or life to save another. How do they do that? How does one have that kind of courage? Bravery is the action of courage.
Courage is a lovely word that derives definition from the French word couer meaning 'heart.' Courage lives in our heart. Since we think of our heart as the place of self that houses and grows love, then logically, courage and love must be connected. Which they are if we ask ourselves what the action of love is. The action - the active form - of love is kindness.
The only math I've ever been adept at is adding ideas to ideas in order to form an equation of conceptualization {this is the mathematics of a writer or one who teaches - you may well flunk algebra with this kind of brain.} If therefore, bravery is the active form of courage and courage lives in the heart with love, and the active form of love is kindness, then bravery and kindness are directly connected. The ability to be brave and the ability to be kind are manifestations of being engaged with love.
One of the very simple precepts I live by is we manifest what we engage. Without being aware of what I was discovering, I actually learned this truth spending a childhood devouring biographies. The wisdom available from biographies is that the whole arc of a life is shown as story and so we see how someone engaged life and what the result was.
How and then result. Using my mathematics of conceptualizing, if I wanted to live bravely: brave = courageous; courageous = heart/love; love = kindness, then I needed to choose a way of living based in active kindness.
Once I realized that kindness was connected to bravery, I was greatly relieved because there was no need to wait for burning buildings, or earthquakes in order to be brave and heroic. I could be brave simply by choosing to respond to life: my self and other people kindly.
We learn by doing and so decided if I wanted my life to be one of bravery then I would need to live with kindness. I discovered that deliberate kindness - as the basis of living - is not especially easy. I discovered that how I treated myself was pretty much how I tended to treat other people. When I am judgmental toward myself, I am judgmental toward others. When I focus on my disappointments, I focus on how others disappointment me. When I focus on my hurts then I tend to be easily hurt. When I treated myself kindly, then I treated people and events with kindness.
I also discovered that living from kindness is risky. When we respond with gentleness we risk being perceived as soft. When we respond with understanding we risk being fooled. When we respond with generosity we risk being taken advantage of. When we respond with friendliness we risk rejection or misunderstanding. When we respond graciously we risk rudeness.
Risking does more than denote bravery. What we risk our selves for is what we become. That is the nugget of truth I learned reading all those biographies: the ultimate choice of our living is the question: what am I willing to risk in order to become?
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